The goal is enormous, the possibilities breathtaking. As
Johns Hopkins officially launches an ambitious new
fund-raising campaign, we sit down with Robert Lindgren,
vice president for development and alumni relations, to find
out how he and his team of fund-raisers are gearing up to
meet the challenge.

The "quiet phase" of this new campaign began on July 1,
2000, the day after the $1.52 billion Johns Hopkins
Initiative ended. Is Johns Hopkins unique in embarking on a
new campaign so soon?

Yes, it's a pretty unusual strategy we're involved in,
though we aren't totally unique. We know that Vassar did
something like this years ago, and Columbia University also
did back-to-back campaigns.

Why move ahead so quickly?

It's a combination of factors. One, the Johns Hopkins
Initiative had such success and generated such momentum and
enthusiasm that it begged for continuing at a higher
level.

Second, campaigns are not just about fund-raising. They are
also a good deal about setting academic priorities within an
institution. Virtually the entire leadership of Johns
Hopkins turned over in the course of the Johns Hopkins
Initiative (1994-2000) from the president to the provost to
all the deans. While the new leadership's vision is not
dramatically different, this whole new set of academic
leaders is looking at the future of the Johns Hopkins
institutions with fresh eyes. This is particularly true in
Medicine, where there has been such a change in the way that
we manage our medical enterprises.

And that's certainly a large part of why institutions do
campaigns -- to articulate a set of academic priorities and
test them in the marketplace.

The economic climate today is much less robust than it was
12 or even 18 months ago. Does that concern
you?

You have to be bullish about doing these large campaigns. I
just got back from a meeting of my counterparts at other
large, private institutions, and we're all experiencing in
this fiscal year a 10 to 15 percent drop in our
[fund-raising numbers]. I think that's a direct result of
the economic environment.

But when you look at a campaign over a seven-year period,
you know that you're probably going to hit a high business
cycle, just like you might hit a low business cycle. As I
remind our staff, we're better off starting in a somewhat
lower business cycle with the anticipation that things are
going to get better than the other way around.

The Campaign
Co-Chairs

J. Barclay Knapp '79 is president and CEO of NTL Inc., a
telecommunications company based in London.

Gail J. McGovern '74, past president of Fidelity Personal
Investments, is on the Harvard Business School faculty.

George L. Bunting, former chair of Noxell Corp., is
president of Bunting Management Group.

There are many donors who were key to the success of the
Johns Hopkins Initiative -- people who gave major,
multimillion-dollar gifts. Will you turn to them for help
again? Or focus instead on an entirely different pool of
potential givers?

The fact is, the best donors to Johns Hopkins, as at most
institutions or charities, are previous donors. So as we
look ahead, we expect that many of our top donors of this
campaign will have participated in the last campaign.

Having said that, Johns Hopkins has derived a particular
benefit from a group of donors whom we refer to as "grateful
patients" -- individuals who have been treated here, or
whose family members have been treated here, or who have an
interest in a particular medical area as the result of a
personal or family experience. With this particular group,
new donors are being introduced to Johns Hopkins on a
continuous basis.

Unlike alumni donors, who often tend to make their larger
gifts some years after leaving the school, grateful patients
make gifts very early in their relationship with the
institution. The longer they are away from that medical
experience, the less likely they are to contribute. So for
that group, timing is crucial.

Half of the total goal, some $1 billion, is targeted toward
priorities on the medical campus, particularly for new
buildings...

Over the years, about half of what we have raised
historically has come in for Medicine, so this isn't a
shifting of priorities or more emphasis on Medicine. The
fact that a larger percentage is for buildings is
significant. It goes back to the question, why do a campaign
now? In part, it's because we have such needs for these
facilities and would be focusing fund-raising efforts on
them anyway, so rolling them up into a larger campaign is a
natural thing to do.

Clearly, we have a large need in East Baltimore to build new
facilities. Basically two new clinical facilities -- a
children's hospital and the Cardiac and Critical Care Tower
that will move the sickest patients in the hospital into new
facilities.

Secondly, we need to expand research space and support. We
continue to attract a very large amount of research funding,
particularly from sources like the National Institutes of
Health where we were once again ranked number one among
medical schools. When we analyze our research space, we are
by far the most efficient among the major medical centers in
the country in terms of grant dollars per square foot of
research space. But there is a trade-off at some point in
being too efficient. The downside is not having enough
space. You have to rely on private philanthropy to provide
the kind of support you give faculty, your ability to retain
faculty, your ability to attract new faculty.

What The Needs
Are...

"We have an obligation to build on the momentum Johns
Hopkins has established, to address pressing issues and
newly emerging needs and opportunities," says New York City
Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Eng '64), outgoing chairman of the
board of trustees. The fund-raising goals, by division:

Division

Goal

Krieger School of Arts
and Sciences

$250 million

Whiting School of
Engineering

$150 million

School of Medicine

$1 billion

Bloomberg School of
PublicHealth

$500 million

School of Nursing

$40 million

School of Professional Studies
inBusiness and Education

$20 million

Peabody Institute

$40 million

Nitze School of Advanced
International Studies

$45 million

Gilman Hall, the first academic building on the Homewood
campus, is due for a $45 million restoration -- the first
major overhaul since it opened in 1915.

Yes, I think in part because the numbers today are so large.
We're talking about a children's hospital that is going to
cost somewhere between $150- and $200 million. Hospitals
today are constrained in the managed care environment by the
sources that can be used to pay for such facilities; they
can't borrow as much, they're not as profitable as they used
to be. Part of the reality is that we need larger and more
expensive buildings with a larger share of private dollars
in the formula.

And, too, grateful patients are highly motivated by
research. They're not as interested in building a research
facility that someone will move into in five years. They're
interested in solving a problem now.

We quite often will package space and research funding
together -- ask for support not only for the professor's
research, but also for a new laboratory where this professor
is going to work.

Much has been written about the "new breed" of donor today
-- Baby Boomers and Generation Xers passionate about
supporting a particular cause -- who are less interested in
having a building named in their honor than in eradicating a
particular disease or ending illiteracy. In your experience,
are today's donors more interested in seeing the "results"
of their contributions?

Yes, absolutely. I think as fund-raising programs have
become more sophisticated in higher education, we have
become more specific about requests, which in turn has meant
our donors have become more specific about the
outcomes....

Do Baby Boomers and Gen Xers desire more specificity
[regarding how their money is spent]? There is a lot of
anecdotal evidence. I'm not sure whether it is a function of
that generation being different as much as a function of
their growing up in a philanthropic environment that is far
more sophisticated than what their parents or grandparents
dealt with.

Think about United Way. You used to give your money to the
United Way -- the whole concept was that it was an
unrestricted gift. You made it. They had a committee and
doled it out to 48 different organizations and you and I
didn't really get into it. Today, most of us tend to
restrict our gifts. That's just the way the world is
working.

What effect have the events of September 11 had on giving at
Johns Hopkins?

The perspective of being almost seven months out is
different than it was in the early fall, when we saw an
almost immediate cessation of giving.

I would say the greatest challenge in philanthropy writ
large is uncertainty. Anytime we're contemplating a major
tax change, donors tend to hold back until they figure out
what the landscape is. Since giving things away is such a
permanent kind of decision, it often necessitates more
certainty in the environment around the decisions.

So 9/11 certainly contributed to a sense of uncertainty for
all of us. We were sensitive to the fact that we didn't want
to continue to do our phone-a-thons and mailings as business
as usual in the first weeks after the event.

... There's another whole line of thinking: What does 9/11
mean to us in terms of what's really important to us? People
are returning to the institutions that are most important to
them -- that provide the most meaning in their lives. To
some extent we think that institutions like Johns Hopkins,
those that are focused on the future, whether it be in
education or research, are perhaps positive outlets for
people as a result of September 11.

Two billion dollars is a staggering number and, ostensibly,
a challenging goal to reach. Do you ever wake up in the
middle of the night wondering: How're we going to do
it?

Yes, $2 billion is a challenging goal -- it's about a 33
percent increase over the last campaign result of $1.52
billion, and we're hoping to do this campaign in a shorter
period of time. The last campaign ran nine years. This
campaign is scheduled to run about seven years, starting
with the quiet phase.

While I don't think by any means that it is a foregone
conclusion, I do think with lots of hard work, persuasion,
and involvement that we can succeed. Hopkins is a great
institution filled with wonderful people, and we are able to
attract the support of our alumni and friends.

[Chuckles] But I learned a long time ago that waking up in
the middle of the night doesn't help.

Key

Existing buildings

New
buildings

D

Billings Building (Dome)

1

New Main Entrance
(Visitor Parking Below)

2

Cardiovascular and Critical
Care Tower

3

Children's and
Maternal Hospital

4

Patient and Family
Housing

5

Parking
Garage

6

Research
Building (Orleans Street)

7

Research
Building (Caroline Street)

8

Research Building
(Broadway)

9

Future Research
Space (Madison Street)

The East Baltimore Campus, Transformed

A planned $1 billion reconstruction of the 52-acre East
Baltimore medical campus calls for 2.2 million square feet
of new space over the next seven to 10 years. Highlights
include a new main entrance on Orleans Street, between
Broadway and Wolfe, two new buildings for patients -- a
children's and maternal building, and a cardiovascular and
clinical care tower -- and lots of new lab space.